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OVERALL

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£119 inc VAT

Amazon Kindle Fire review

Because of its low price, and the fact that Amazon is the only company on the planet with the media chops to take on Apple iTunes, the Amazon Kindle Fire has been painted by some as the putative heir to the Apple iPad 2's throne as king of tablets. Sadly, beneath the Kindle Fire's slick veneer and unparalleled shopping integration lies a tablet that fails to impress as either a tablet or as an e-reader. We don't know when we'll get it in the UK, and that may not be such a bad thing. See also: New iPad review. (See also: Kindle Fire HD vs Kindle Fire HD 8.9 review.)

The Kindle Fire is best considered a relatively inexpensive, hassle-free but flawed way to consume books, music, and videos purchased at Amazon. Like an iPod, but for Amazon. As a tablet, though, the Fire can't hold a flame to the best tablets available today: it has subpar specs, a limited interface, and a surprisingly messy app store.

When the Amazon Kindle Fire was first introduced, I immediately wondered where it would fit into the overall tablet universe. It runs a custom operating system based on Android 2.3, limits you to buying apps solely via the Amazon Appstore, and has just 8GB of storage, all red flags that made this tablet stand as a curiosity amidst the rest of the Android crowd. But at $200 in the US, and with the colossal weight of Amazon behind it, the Fire automatically becomes worth talking about.

And that despite that Amazon hasn't even given a date when the rest of the world can buy the Kindle Fire (our best guess is that we may have to forget this iteration, and wait for a Kindle Fire 2).

Amazon Kindle Fire's integration with Amazon's media storefronts is, bar none, the best thing about this tablet. Rather than have one place to shop, and another to use your digital media, Amazon consolidates these experiences into one. The Newsstand, Books, Music, and Apps tabs all take you to your personal library first, and then have a prominent but not offensive option to go to the store for that category. (The exception to this is the Video tab, which deposits you in the video storefront first, and then lets you hopscotch into your personal Library.) The seamless interface makes acquiring content of any kind - be it for ownership, or, in the case of movies and TV shows, streaming, or rental - the best experience of any I've tried on a tablet.

In most other respects, Kindle Fire left me feeling tepid, at best. Let's walk through the device step-by-step to see which marks it hits, and which it misses.

Amazon Kindle Fire: Simple Design

Physically, the Kindle Fire does little to distinguish itself. Contrary to some reports, it really doesn't resemble black tablets like the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, which was rumoured to to be Amazon's starting point for the Kindle Fire. In fact, the Fire is smaller than the PlayBook, measuring 190x119x11mm, and weighing just over 400g. That's a hair heavier than Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, and noticeably heavier than Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

While the Fire didn't feel especially heavy or tiresome to hold in one hand while reading, its weight is still less than ideal. In fact, a survey of five colleagues saw a clear preference for the weight and balance of the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. All preferred the Fire's velvety back, which has a smooth, rubberized texture that makes it easy to hold.

Overall, the Fire has a curious design. It has an asymmetrical black bezel surrounding the 7-inch display (it's thicker along the bottom, when held in portrait mode). The tablet takes simplicity to the extreme. It has just one button, a sleep/wake/power button placed along the bottom edge. I liked that the button was easy to press, and that it glows red when charging, but it was also too easy to accidentally invoke. Next to the power button are the micro-USB port for charging and transferring data, and a headphone jack.

Both of the Fire's speakers are located along the same edge (the top, if held in portrait mode, the left edge in landscape). That means you'll lose the stereo effect no matter how you hold the Fire, and likely end up covering one of the speakers with your hand when holding it in landscape.

The only cabling included is a wall charger; you'll need your own USB cable (if you want to transfer data between your PC and Fire) and headphones. Volume control is handled entirely via software, and this proved problematic time and again, especially when in apps (more on this later).

When you first start-up the tablet, the Fire walks you through a few simple setup points, and then deposits you into your home screen - the same screen you land in when you swipe to the left to unlock the device.

The home screen has a search bar at top, with tabs for Newsstand (where you access various periodicals), Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, and Web beneath. At the centre of the home screen is a central carousel that shows your most recent acquisitions or most recently accessed content of any sort - books, periodicals, music, videos, web sites, apps - in reverse order, with the latest on top. You can flip through these, and they go by surprisingly quickly, but I found it bothersome to find age-old books I'd bought showing up in this carousel, even if I hadn't downloaded the books from my cloud archive to the device (at least the same didn't happen with my sizable Amazon music collection).

At the bottom of the home screen is a Favorites shelf. Kindle Fire comes with Amazon's Appstore app, the Pulse reader app, the IMDB app, and the Facebook app icons pinned there already. Temper your enthusiasm, though - the Facebook "app" merely leads you off to the mobile version of the Facebook site.

The top of the home screen shows the name of your device, the time, battery status, and Wi-Fi status, and it also features a "gears" button that calls up a popover. for quick access to various settings like the rotation lock, the volume slider - your only volume control for the tablet - brightness, Wi-Fi, and sync (for use with Amazon's Whispernet synchronization between Kindle devices). And it serves as a the jumping point for the main settings menu.

Want to go back to where you were previously? Tap on the sole, clearly delineated back arrow at the bottom of the screen. Or tap the home button, also clearly delineated, when it appears at the lower left. When in apps, you can navigate by tapping on the up arrow at the bottom of the screen, which in turn reveals the home, back, and menu buttons. But if you're viewing video in Amazon's video player, you'll need to swipe up from the bottom, since the player takes up the whole screen.

Overall, on the surface Amazon's grey-and-orange themed interface is an improvement over standard Android 2.3, with clearer labels and cleaner design on the whole.

As noted already, Amazon did a good job at integrating its stores into the Fire's individual content sections. Visually, the book-shelf metaphor of your content libraries works well, even if that presentation lacks the personalization many crave. Moving between content in Amazon's cloud locker and stuff stored on the device is as simple as choosing cloud or device; the two are clearly delineated by a consistent visual element throughout all of the libraries. Find something you love, or want to remove? Just tap on the cover and hold down - and pick between adding to the favorites bar on the home screen, and removing from the tablet entirely.

I liked how the Amazon video player functions. Even if you're watching a video streamed on- demand from the Amazon cloud, you can still easily skip ahead a bit. And if you miss a few moments, no problem: Tap on the 10 second rewind for a quick fix.

The built-in email app will get the job done for the basics, but its layout is not especially optimized for landscape, for example, as you'll find with an Android 3.x Honeycomb tablet. And if you back out of the email app to do something else, it returns you to the top of your email list, not to the last message your were viewing.

Forget about multitasking as a whole. Kindle Fire lacks shortcuts to make it easier to get between content, as you'll find in standard Android 2.3 or in the tablet-optimized Android 3.x.

Amazon's contacts app is uninspiring; and surprisingly, the Kindle doesn't come with a basic calendar or clock app, two standard inclusions in Honeycomb tablets.

For all the fuss made about Amazon's Silk Web browser, which uses a proxy server to cache frequently accessed sites and purportedly speed surfing speeds, I can't say I noticed much of a difference in my Web surfing. Maybe I didn't hit the popular sites, or maybe the difference is that minimal that it won't be obvious in casual use. The browser supports tabs, at least, which is an improvement over the standard Android 2.3 browser, but I'm still a bit leery of how Amazon manages the whole caching process. And I'm so far not convinced of the process' efficiency.

Even the Docs tab didn't behave as I'd expected. I thought it logical that all documents I've transferred to the device to show there, but only PDFs showed up there. The other Microsoft Word and Excel documents were only accessible via the included Quickoffice document viewer app, under the "Apps" tab. If you want document creation or editing, you'll have to step up to the full Quickoffice Pro or another compatible office suite.

Far from being a half-priced Apple iPad 2 killer, we found the Amazon Kindle Fire unimpressive as either tablet or e-reader. Here's what we thought of its software and performance.

Amazon Kindle Fire: Apps and the Appstore

App behaviours were all over the map. With no Google Android Market on-board, the curated Amazon Appstore is your sole source for apps, short of sideloading apps from another source - something I don't expect of the average Kindle Fire owner. But at launch, Amazon's Appstore was disappointing, and my experience with apps as a whole weighed down my impression of the Kindle Fire as a tablet .

For one, most of the apps I downloaded ended up looking as if they were phone apps blown out to fit the big screen. This a problem for any Android 2.2 or 2.3 tablet, which is why we don't recommend these tablets at this point. (Android 3.x Honeycomb tablets may have similar issues with legacy apps, but at least those tablets can also run apps optimized for tablets.)

The difference in experience between phone and tablet apps on a 7-inch screen can be huge. What's most surprising is that I'd have expected Amazon to handpick apps from its Appstore that best show off what the Kindle Fire can do. Instead, my random downloads produced apps with fuzzy, phone-ready graphics and menu design, and my searches revealed apps that won't even work right on Kindle Fire because Fire lacks the necessary hardware. Even Angry Birds wasn't ready for primetime here; two versions of Angry Birds launched upside down, depending upon how I held the tablet. Oops.

Kindle Fire Software: Clean, But Buggy

For as many thoughtful design touches as Kindle Fire has, I found just as many glitchy behaviors. In all, they speak to premature software, and some things that may, perhaps, be fixed with future software updates.

For example, book page turns didn't always feel smooth, but highlighting passages gave me no issues. Animations and graphics were jerky, but that carousel on the home screen is insanely zippy.The music player was well-presented and is an improvement over standard Android 2.x tablets, but the interface was at times inconsistent (tapping on a song in the cloud to do something with it brought up a jarringly Android-like menu). The Amazon-supplied on-screen keyboard has a good layout for typing, but I nonetheless found myself prone to a few more errors than I'm used to on other 7-inch Honeycomb tablets.

Other random issues I encountered: The keyboard in the Newsstand didn't work consistently when in landscape mode, it wouldn't always register various taps on the screen, and sometimes the interface ran away with itself (e.g. in one instance, when I zoomed in on a photo, the image moved every which way).

While many of those are clearly software bugs that annoy, but don't impede the use of the tablet, my bigger concerns lie with the image quality compromises I idenitifed with Kindle Fire .

Let's start with the image gallery. A tablet's gallery lets you easily show off photos of family and friends. But Kindle Fire's Gallery app, however, limits the usefulness of this indispensable tool: It resizes all the photos loaded into the Gallery app - regardless of whether you add them by dragging and dropping to the tablet when it's connected to your PC, or you download the image via e-mail. By resizing images, images become soft and pixillated, and you can't zoom in on them (and when you do, all you get is a hot mess of blockiness). One of my test images, for example, was resized to 486 by 324, from its original 3888 by 2592 pixels, which made for an unacceptable viewing experience.

The issue lies entirely with Amazon's Gallery app. That same photo renders well in a random but kludgey free image viewer I downloaded, with better colour and saturation, and reasonably sharp detail. But in the Kindle Fire native image gallery? Not even close.

Knowing that Amazon has made such choices for me on the gallery makes me question what other trade-offs the company may have made in the name of Amazon's perceived greater good.

My experience with the native image gallery app makes me question other complaints I had with image quality; I can't help but wonder how much of what I saw was a design decision that traded off one thing for another. My streaming and downloaded Amazon Instant Videos always looked soft, and often pixillated; and text was soft, too - in the Newsstand, and in books at some font and text combinations. (I liked the Lucida font best, and even then it wasn't as smooth as I've seen on the most-capable Android tablets, including models with similar resolution and screen sizes). Even audio playback was wonky; audio reached a reasonable volume and body for music, but sounded downright anemic on videos played through the Amazon Video player, and via the Hulu Plus app (other apps had low-ish volume, too).

For me, those trade-offs are simply not worthwhile, even to save a few bucks. What's the point of being able to easily procure video, if my videos are going to be soft, have artifacts, and not sound great?

Amazon Kindle Fire: Modest Specs and Performance

Tablets are more about usability than specs. That said, the Kindle Fire's skimpy specs is one of the clear sacrifices Amazon made to achieve its $200 price.

Amazon uses a Texas Instruments OMAP 4 dual-core processor; but in use, the Fire didn't feel like it was a dual-core tablet. It lagged on transitions, even simple ones like turning pages in books or rotating orientation; it produced jerky animations; and video playback was repeatedly pixillated. It's unclear whether all of the blame lies solely with the 512MB of RAM - half what's standard on 7-inch tablets from companies like Acer and Samsung. Software optimization could also be part of the issue here; after all, Amazon's custom build of the Android 2.3 operating system could have some kinks, too. But in use, I became all too familiar with the spinning ball wait indicator as something loaded, and I felt as if I paid with my time what I saved in money on the Fire's modest price.

Some missing elements weren't felt immediately, though. For example, Kindle Fire has neither a front-facing nor a rear-facing camera, and it lacks GPS. None of these felt like onerous omissions on their own, but they are standard inclusions in the pricier top-tier competitive set, and their omission means you're making a choice not to use your tablet for video chat, scanning an image, or navigating your way around town - all of which are practical uses you may miss having in the long-run. At $200, you're getting what you pay for.

If you plan to pack this tablet with apps, music, books, and movies, you'll be disappointed: The Fire has only 8GB of storage space, and only 6.54GB is user-accessible. In practical use, it took little to blast through a couple of gigabytes of space , and even Amazon admits in its specs that the on-board storage can only hold 10 movies at a time, for example. And unlike Barnes & Noble's $200 Nook colour and $250 Nook Tablet, the Kindle Fire has no microSD card slot, so you can't add more space as needed.

We ran some of the PCWorld Labs' tablet tests on the Fire, and found decidedly mixed results. It was the second slowest tablet of more than two dozen we've tested at transferring files from a PC. On the SunSpider JavaScript test, the Fire was slower than the HTC Flyer (Wi-Fi) and every Honeycomb tablet we've tested, but faster than last year's original 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, and a slew of tablets with single-core, sub-1GHz processors and Android 2.2 operating systems.

Amazon bills the battery life as lasting for up to 8 hours of continuous reading, or 7.5 hours of video playback, but those estimates are based on Wi-Fi being turned off. With Wi-Fi on, I found my casual use of the tablet drained the battery surprisingly quickly. In about three hours and 45 minutes, the battery dropped from 56 percent to zilch; brightness was set to the default of three-quarters maximum, and the tablet was used just for some light Web browsing, e-mail, downloading a few apps, and streaming a handful of tunes and a few minutes of video. Stay tuned for our full battery life tests, which remain in progress.

The 7-inch IPS LCD screen carries a 1024 by 600 pixel resolution, and an anti-reflective coating. The Fire also has a fairly obvious air-gap between the screen's glass surface and the LCD panel itself. The Kindle Fire's screen was noticeably more reflective than the Barnes & Noble's Nook colour when I compared the two side-by-side.

Amazon Kindle Fire HD: Specs

7-inch tablet

Google Android 2.3 with Amazon interface

dual-core

Wi-Fi

169 pixels per inch display

190x119x11mm

412g

7-inch tablet

Google Android 2.3 with Amazon interface

dual-core

Wi-Fi

169 pixels per inch display

190x119x11mm

412g

OUR VERDICT

The Kindle Fire makes trade-offs to achieve its $200 price. It's easy to dismiss some of the trade-offs and weakness of the Kindle Fire as the sacrifices necessary to achieve a price point, but the reality is that the Fire may not meet your expectations if you're looking for Apple iPad 2-like tablet. For those that go in knowing what they're getting, and who want an inexpensive tablet that capably, though not spectacularly, handles their Amazon books, music, and video, the Kindle Fire's limitations may be acceptable. However, the Fire falls far short of providing a full and satisfying tablet experience.

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Comments

Doddschristina said: Comments,Doddschristina,unhappy that I cannot use my kindle fire properly due to the fact that I cannot use my Adobe flash player to access tv or video

GraphEaty said: Comments,GraphEaty,Just got it today. Some of us do travel right? I guess we would be a bit distressed if our iPad or laptop did not work overseas? Well, the Kindle Fire is useless outside the US...no Amazon Apps, no Video, no Android Market...just a lousy web browser and patchy wireless connection (it drops out a lot and am running it side by side next to an Android phone which works fine).
Can't change or download a thing. Is simply a cheap front-end driven by Amazon content, if you can't access the content, i.e you are not physically in the US, then is just a poor web browser. I can read my Kindle books but the standard Kindle is much, much better as an e-reader. The review is correct, look beyond the Amazon content and as a tablet it is flawed and limited. If you want a portable Amazon shop window and "World Series" means global to you, then this device is probably good value for money. Outside the US it is a rather over-sized beer mat.

Matt Egan said: Comments,Matt Egan,I'd be amazed if we (the UK) get the first Kindle Fire. It may not be a bad thing for two reasons. (1) we might get away from this idea that because the Fire is a 'tablet' and it costs half what the iPad does, it's a bargain. They do different things: the Fire is better compared with the iPod touch. It's a device for consuming media. (2) because of this, the Fire isn't worth a candle until the Amazon media download/streaming tie-ins all work. And it's clearly buggy. So for UK users at the minute it would be £200 wasted. All being well the Kindle Fire 2 will be a must have for Britons.

soricon said: Comments,soricon,Some benchmarks just came out and Kindle Fire is not that fiery ...http://reviewhorizon.com/2011/...

Matt Egan said: Comments,Matt Egan,The author did have a unit in hand. Has used it for a while. I tend to find that comments should be disregarded when they make essential errors.

shooter50 said: Comments,shooter50,Possibly the worst review of the dozens I've read. So let me say this. I received my Fire today and I'm also an iPad owner. The Fire is a bargain at 200.00. I don't expect it to equal an iPad and you shouldn't either, but is a fantastic device for it's price. It woeks well as a consumption device and at $200.00 will surely satisfy most non Geek users who could care less about specs. When a review is extreme in its bashing OR praise of a product, it should be discounted and this review (preview) should be discounted for it's bashing of this product. Especially considering the author didnt have a unit in hand.

Steve said: Comments,Steve,How is this a 'review' ? More like a preview. You do know what a review is right, where you actually have the product on hand and have used for a good period of time, you know, to review it? Shockingly misleading title.

geek said: Comments,geek,Tough crowd. More than enough information to judge the utility of the Fire and given the price ordering one is a no brainer. Accepting what it is and there is certainly enough information to explain that, thank you. Those who want to complain about it is not or the lack of a hands on review will never be satisfied. Cloud storage, a custom browser, a first class display, enough information for me.

dimawil said: Comments,dimawil,interestingly i always wanted to know whether their browser will support flash playback?
and i also assume it will be a drag and drop system if i want to upload my own mp3s and avi files?

Matt Egan said: Comments,Matt Egan,Some good points there dimawil. The basic idea of the Kindle Fire is very interesting, but there is a lot for Amazon to prove here.

dimawil said: Comments,dimawil,I think for a company that is new to the game and is slightly misleading their audience, they are very tight lipped. if they want to compete with the big boys, and i assume they do, they need to be warmer with their q&amp;a. every review i saw on youtube where they asked amazon people questions were met with differing answers and also just plain lack of knowledge.
the author is right to say that ok this costs only 199 but what happens if i want to upgrade my os to sandwich? if it doesnt support that and i have to buy a new one then thats another 199 and the originial 199 becomes a 398 which is an ipad 2.
i think amazon dont know themselves where they are and this shows through their lack of knowledge about the future of the tabley.

Gl said: Comments,Gl,The title is extremely misleading. This is not a review, at best it could be classified as a brief preview.

Phil Levy said: Comments,Phil Levy,Still I do think that "in depth preview" would be less misleading than "review".

Matt Egan said: Comments,Matt Egan,Hi Ken. The author has been very careful to explicitly describe her experience of the device. We are very keen not to mislead, but we feel there is good information to impart here, but we won't - for instance - give a star rating. This is our review at this stage: as soon as we have our hands on the device there will be a more objective, benchmarked review, but in the mean time I think this piece is useful and informative.

KMxRetro said: Comments,KMxRetro,Can you tell me how you've "reviewed" this item, given that you don't actually have one?